most melancholy: but I keep it wet with
vinegar, and defy the hornets how I can.

What is more surprising than all, however, is to hear that no lemons can
be procured for less than two pence English a-piece; and now I am almost
ready to join myself in the general cry against Italian imposition, and
recollect the proverb which teaches us

Chi ha da far con Tosco,
Non bisogna esser losco[AB];

[Footnote AB:
Who has to do with Tuscan wight,
Of both his eyes will need the light.
]

as I am confident they cannot be worth even two pence a hundred here,
where they hang like apples in our cyder countries; but the rogues know
that my husband is sick, and upon poor me they have no mercy.

I have sent our folks out to gather fruit at a venture: and now this
misery will soon be ended with his illness; driven away by deluges of
lemonade, I think, made in defiance of wasps, flies, and a kind of
volant beetle, wonderfully beautiful and very pertinacious in his
attacks; and who makes dreadful depredations on my sugar and
currant-jelly, so necessary on this occasion of illness, and so
attractive to all these detestable inhabitants of a place so lovely.

My patient, however, complaining that although I kept these harpies at a
distance, no sleep could yet be obtained;--I resolved when he was risen,
and had changed his room, to examine into the true cause: and with my
maid's assistance, unript the mattress, which was without exaggeration
or hyperbole _all alive_ with creatures wholly unknown to me.
Non-descripts in nastiness I believe they are, like maggots with horns
and tails; such a race as I never saw or heard of, and as would have
disgusted Mr. Leeuenhoeck himself. My willingness to quit this place and
its hundred-footed inhabitants was quickened three nights after by a
thunder storm, such as no dweller in more northern latitudes can form an
idea of; which, afflicted by some few slight shocks of an earthquake,
frighted us all from our beds, sick and well, and gave me an opportunity
of viewing such flashes of lightning as I had never contemplated till
now, and such as it appeared impossible to escape from with life. The
tremendous claps of thunder re-echoing among these Appenines, which
double every sound, were truly dreadful. I really and sincerely thought
St. Julian's mountain was rent by one violent stroke, accompanied with a
rough concussion, and that the rock would fall upon our heads by
morning; while the